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At the same time, Rep. Phil Gingrey, a six-term congressman from the northern Atlanta suburbs who is falling in the polls, unleashed an ad this week dubbing the three leading contenders as “moderates” — and accusing Handel of “promoting teenage homosexuality” when she backed funding for an LGBT group on the Fulton County commission in 2006.

Her camp roundly dismissed it as a cheap shot by a flailing candidate.

Democrats are sitting back and hoping this is the same movie they’ve seen before: brutal primary wars that spell GOP disaster, much like 2010 and 2012. Nunn, a political novice whose father is the former Sen. Sam Nunn, is skating to her party’s nomination pretty much unscathed.

“I think the [Republican] primary has become a race to the extremes,” Nunn said in an interview in Atlanta.

Republicans, certainly, recognize the risks. Addressing a group of police officers at the Gordon County sheriff’s office in Calhoun, Ga., the 59-year-old Kingston said: “How many of y’all have seen that the conservative family might be a little bit divided right now? … And how many of y’all know, divided we fall?”

“Amen!” a man yelled out.

The Perdue pile-on

Many Republicans view Perdue as the ideal type of candidate for the GOP. He’s a telegenic businessman who can boast of creating jobs and turning around Fortune 500 companies. He lacks the baggage of a voting record and can pump millions of his own cash into his campaign. Plus he has a famous last name — his cousin is former two-term Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, who left office only three years ago.

David Perdue barnstorms the state in a blue RV bearing his slogan, “The Outsider,” arguing to voters it’s time to send a nonpolitician to Washington.

At his campaign events, a volunteer is designated to blast music from his mobile phone whenever there’s a video tracker nearby, to prevent an opponent from catching Perdue in an unscripted moment with voters. But that can only do so much: In recent weeks Perdue’s unscripted moments have allowed his GOP critics to argue he’s not a true Republican.

Speaking to the Macon Telegraph editorial board, Perdue was asked whether raising revenue or cutting spending is the best way to slice the deficit. “Both,” he interjected. His opponents seized on the comment and claimed he was endorsing a tax increase. (He later said it was a reference to increasing revenue through economic growth, not tax increases, which he’s signed a pledge to oppose as a senator.)

Perdue, 64, says that as one of a handful of senators with business experience, he would be able to break perpetual gridlock over legislation to stem the budget deficit and bolster economic growth. But every time Perdue offers a whiff of compromise, he gets pounded by his opponents, so it’s unclear exactly where he’d bend. In the interview, he doubted the science of climate change and said he wouldn’t bother to fix Obamacare, saying the whole law needs to be scrapped. He called talk of raising the minimum wage “backward thinking.”

“There’s very little difference between these five candidates, honestly,” Perdue said, referring to their ideology.

To fight back against charges of “elitism,” Perdue — whose minimum net worth is estimated at $11.9 million, and who has pumped $2.7 million of his own cash into the race so far, with more likely to come if he makes the runoff — points out how his parents were both public schoolteachers and says he earned his money by being a risk-taker in business.

But his rivals are trying to undermine that very record in the corporate world. Kingston accuses Perdue of “bankrupting” a company in the early 2000s, a reference to a North Carolina-based textile firm, Pillowtex, which laid off nearly 8,000 workers soon after he stepped aside as CEO. He disputes Perdue’s central selling point that he helped turn around Dollar General, saying he “didn’t do a very good job.” And he says Democrats will pound Perdue for his work with Haggar Clothing Co. that cut jobs in Texas and outsourced them in the late 1990s.